In Your Words – Breathing new life into the Survey of English Dialect

The Dialect and Heritage Project is a national project based on a partnership between the University of Leeds and five member museums of the Rural Museums Network. Supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, we have been taking dialect and heritage resources out of the archive and putting them back into the local communities where they truly belong. At the same time, we have been encouraging members of the public to share their present-day dialect with us. The project has tapped into massive public appetite for sharing dialect leading to huge media coverage. In this talk, we will introduce you to the rich dialect archives held at the University of Leeds, explain what the project has been up to and how you can access the resources, hear from museum partners about what they have got out of it, and think about where we might be headed next.